The above identified parent application, published on Aug. 25, 2016, U.S. 2016-0247365A is hereby incorporated by reference. The application concerns devices for generating sounds so as to be able to be heard by an occupant of a residence or other building, so as to be made aware of the presence of a delivery person at the door who wishes to contact the occupant to make a delivery, is leaving a package to be delivered, or to inform the occupant of an emergency requiring evacuation, or for some other reason.
A door bell is often provided to alert a building occupant of the presence of someone at the door. When a button is pressed by the visitor, a sound is produced within the building such as the ringing of a bell or a buzzer.
The visitor may also simply knock on the door with a clenched first in the age old manner to make his or her presence known to an occupant of the building. However, delivery personnel may make many calls in the course of the day and may over time experience discomfort or chronic injury from repetitively knocking on many doors with his or her fist. Potentially injurious pounding of a hand on the hard surface of a door may discourage the delivery personnel from making a determined knocking effort, thus lowering the chances that a person will hear the knock and respond.
Another very common device to assist the visitor is the door knocker comprised of a pivoted knocker piece which strikes a fixed metal piece mounted on the door to enable a knocking sound to be made without requiring the visitor to knock on the door with his or her bare fist.
When a visitor attempts to announce his or her presence at the door by any one of these traditional practices the visitor is usually not certain whether any occupant has heard the knocking or the door bell.
This is because the door bell often is not working or is not loud enough to alert an occupant in places within the building far from the door or the door bell sounder.
Similarly, a knocker may also not produce a loud enough sound to be heard in remote areas within the building, which also can happen with a visitor directly knocking on the door, especially if the visitor is reluctant to knock loudly due to a tenderness of his or her knuckles caused by knocking on many doors.
Furthermore, door bells, pivoted knockers, or other means are often simply not provided to be available to a caller to use.
In some instances, when there is no response, a delivery driver will need to attempt a re-delivery, sometimes more than once, which wastes both time and resources of the delivery company.
Sophisticated electronic door bell systems have been developed which can provide voice messaging and other desired communications between an occupant and a visitor, but these have generally been too complex and expensive to make and install to come into general use. See for example devices described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,774,039; 6,721,408; 6,759,955; and U.S. patent publications 2006/0078102 and 2004/0057567.
These problems are especially acute for delivery personnel, door-to-door salespeople, census takers, mail carriers, etc. and for emergency personnel engaged in warning building occupants of the need to evacuate the premises.
Also, hotel and apartment staff may want to alert occupants of rented rooms or suites that they are about to enter the room for cleaning or other housekeeping purposes since ideally an entry should be announced by the staff personnel if the room is occupied to avoid unnecessarily startling the occupant.
In the case of robots used in law enforcement, it is safer for law enforcement personnel to employ mobile robots to contact occupants of a building with an evacuation order as compared to sending personnel into an area under the threat of explosive devices. Robots may efficiently and effectively communicate emergency orders to building or apartment occupants in multiple locations with the device of this invention in a manner that is more effective than simply hand knocking on numerous doors and trying to yell through doors, walls, windows, etc. comprised of various composition and thickness. Robots and drones may contact occupants in ways that are not possible by humans such as providing emergency messages via windows, walls or roofs by airborne drones.
The above cited parent application describes and claims a simple, low cost and reliable device for generating loud penetrating alerting sounds able to be reliably heard within the interior of a building so that occupants will more reliably be made aware of a visitor being present at the door when compared with prior methods described above.
This device, although simple, enables voice messages and/or other sounds to be broadcast into a building interior by the device which is located outside to the exterior of the building.
This device is compact, lightweight and self-contained so as to allow easy portability by delivery or other personnel to be able to be hand carried and handled as necessary at any location at which they call without requiring any electrical connections or physical changes to be made to the building where the user is attempting to make contact with an occupant.
This device enables broadcasting verbal messages to occupants of a building that are in their language which may be of a different language than that of the user of the device or that of the language of pre-recorded messages stored in a source of audio signals included in this device.
This capability eliminates any need for people to forcefully knock at doors with their fists or to yell in order to gain the attention of an occupant of a building, thus eliminating potential hand injury or straining of the voice.
Recently, it has been proposed and implemented in order to eliminate delivery to residencies, businesses, etc. normally performed by a delivery person, and instead use transporter devices such as drones and robots, either autonomous or remotely controlled such as aircraft but also includes other equipment or mechanisms to lower shipping costs and to speed the delivery process.
It is an object of the present invention to adapt that device for use or combined with a drone or robot or other non human transporters.
Cell phones, electronic tablets, and hand held meters for reading electricity and gas usage have also recently come into wide usage.
It is a further object to combine such a sound generating device with personal devices including but not limited to mobile phones, tablets, meter readers and to provide such sound generating capability more conveniently available when circumstances require, which also provides a miniature portable public address system.